Frequently Asked Questions

About Feng Office

Yes, you can. You have a choice of using Feng Office hosted by Feng Office in World class Data Centers or to host it on your own servers. Many of our clients have gone for this option due to law requisites, company policies or other reasons.

We have been working on Mobile Compatibility so that any smartphone or tablet - no matter if it has Android, iOS or a different Operating System - can access Feng Office as long as you have an internet connection and you are running the Professional or Enterprise Edition.

There are two Editions of Feng Office: Community Edition and Professional Edition.

We sometimes call them CE and PE for short.

The Community Edition is a Web-based Collaboration Platform that integrates worksapce management, tasks list planning and tracking, document management, e-mail, time tracking, conversation, reports, and more. It helps teams communicate, stay organized and share information in an efficient way.

The Professional Edition keeps all of the Community Edition and adds extra features. Some of the additional features of the Professional Edition include: Client Management, Project Portfolio Management, Gantt Chart, and advanced e-mail management. It helps professional businesses and organizations ensure quality services and processes, keep control of projects, save time and money, and making happy clients and teams.

1- Click on your name (top right corner)
2- Select Edit preferences, on your right, under the Actiosn section
3- Now get to General and look for the Localization field
4- Pick a language
5- Scroll down or up and save the changes

You may also change the language in the login screen:
1- Get to the login screen
2- Press Options
3- Change the language

Yes, it does. This is great because you will no longer have to rely on a specific computer to look into your email, you can share them with your colleagues easily without having to forward them, and most importantly..they can be autoclassified within your Clients or Projects area, so that you can keep track of everything you said or were said.

You may find further information on how to set your email accounts in this article.

We love making new features, customizations, adjustments and tweaks to the system. If it is general enough sometimes we may even add them to one of the standard versions.

One thing you should keep in mind when thinking about making a custom development to your Feng Office is that you will most likely want the change to be of top quality, and to keep it updated and running with time. That means that it will require a good amount of dedication from analysts, designers, developers and testers to develop it in the first place, and then it will have to be maintained with future Feng Office releases.

Given that we get so many of these requests, we only provide custom development service to Subscribed Customers with a 12 months pre-payment recor, or by charging for the analysis service

Yes, you may! This is something that few systems around have, but we got it covered to provide our clients with as much flexibility as possible!

In case there is some additional information for the users, contacts, documents, tasks, etc. that we do not have a field for by default, you may add it at your will. Then, you can run reports and get this information as well.

Some of our clients are Non Profit Organizations and some are Organizations oriented towards Education.

As such, some of them may be elegible for a discount by presenting the right documentation and telling us a bit about what do they do and how would they be implementing Feng Office. Then, our Management Team will look into it and decide on the matter.

1- Disabling a user:
This means that the user will no longer be able to access the system, but all the data he/she has worked on will be kept. Otherwise you would then be asking who has made that comment? Who has uploaded that document? Who is the assignee of this task?

2- Deleting a user:
This is only possible when the user has made no actions within the system, but logging in. No consistency issues would happen here, so it would be completely wiped out of the system.

To use billing through tasks you need to create the billing category and assign it to the specific users. To create a category you should go to “Administration” ->”Billing”, and assign a name, description and value to the working hour.

After creating this category, you should assign it to a user/s (the option is in “Administration” ->”Billing”). It’s convenient to use the “Update timeslots with unset billing values” to recalculate the value of working time based on the previously entered rate.

Once youhaveperformed the proceduresmentioned above, itwill begin calculatingthe invoice valueof the hours workedaccordingto the categoryassociated with the user.

Sometimes you want tasks to be completed only if other tasks have been completed. Good news! You can do this in the Professional and Enterprise Editions of Feng Office!

Just need to do as following:1- Click on your name (top right corner) and go to Administration2- Go to Configuration and then select General3- Enable the option called Use task dependencies4- Save the changes

You would then need to create a task - lets say Task A - and then create a new task - lets call it Task B -.

Later on, you may access the aforementioned task or edit it, and then look for for the Previous task section (within Task data). Now you would just have to click on Add previous task and look for another one (lets say Task A). After doing this, you will not be able to complete Task B until Task A has not been completed.

Feng Office supports automatic timezone recognition through the browser (which is what we suggest), but some people may prefer using a fixed one.

In order to change this value from one to another you have to:

1- Click on your name (top right corner)
2- Select Account to access your profile
3- Now.. this part may be a bit tricky. There is one section called Contact Information and another one called User Information. You have to click on the Edit button right next to User Information
4- If you want the timezone to be autodetected, set the Auto-detect user timezone from browser option to Yes. Otherwise, set it to No and select a fixed timezone
5- Click on Save changes

Important Note: Feng Office currently handles both tasks and events with an "international point of view" since most organizations using Feng Office do it globally.
This means that if you set up an event at 3 PM GMT +1, and then have a daylight saving time change that makes your new timezone as GMT 0, the event will still remain at 3 PM GMT +1, therefore having it at 2 PM GMT 0.
In these cases most, if not all, organizations foresee theses scenarios and take the timezone into account when creating/editing the task or event in question.

In the near future this feature will be improved though so that "local only" events and tasks are taken into consideration in an easier way.

This file is generated by Outlook Express. It is a very rare format that most email clients do not understand and receive as winmail.dat instead of receiving the attachments. Outlook does understand them since it is the one program generating them.

Please note that chances are some of your clients or providers also receive your emails with this format and may not be able to open them correctly, so it would be wise to change your Outlook settings if possible.

In these cases one of the most popular applications is http://www.winmaildat.com/, but there are many others around which may help in these cases.

Also, according to our investigations, Gmail may comprehend and correctly receive some of these winmail.dat files, but not absolutely all of them, so it is not just a "Feng Office issue".

In this other article you may find an application to install to ThunderBird (a very popular mail client, even more than Outlook) which may open some of these files, but not all of them since they are created by Microsoft closed standards:

Feng Office possesses a 24/7 monitoring system for hardware and software that ensures identification of deviations prior to any failure of normal operation. Also, we update the database software with the latest security patches.

Our clients data is the most valuable thing we have, and as such, we are very careful and meticulous with it.

1- We do not provide any data of yours (not even your email address) to third parties
2- Every employee in Feng Office signs a Confidentiality Agreement
3- Not all of the employees can access the servers, just some of them
4- Even so, no one will be accessing your data. In case we ever have to due to Support measures, we would be asking for your permission first

Our clients data is the most valuable thing we have, and as such, we are very careful and meticulous with it.

That is why we have backups done every 8 to 24 hours done, and then they are saved in different servers in case anything wrong went to happen with the original server.
Backups include backing up your whole database, as well as the filesystem (where all your emails and documents are saved).

Note: soon these backups will be in real time

Free Community Edition section

In this section you will find FAQs for the free downloaded Community Edition for users that have no subscription plan with Feng Office

With so many improvements and new features, there are slight chances that very small bugs are found in the Beta versions. Should you happen to come across with any of them, please do report it so that we can look into the matter.

If you are subscribed to our services, please contact your Account Executive or our Support Team for a faster response.

In case you are using the Community Edition for free, please report the bug here

Yes, we would love to help you! But please understand that thousands of users everyday are using the Community Edition. If we gave free support to all the users we wouldn’t have time to keep on developing the Community Edition and neither would we make money, which would lead to looking for other jobs and letting Feng Office die.

Neither would it be fair for those people and companies paying for a personalized service as well.

So yes, we would love to help you, but also ask you that you first pay for the support in advance if you are in such a rush.

We appreciate bug reports. However, please understand that in order to build the product the developers and the support team should focus on either fixing general bugs, or providing support to paid customers (the ones that make Feng Office possible), such as we have explained in earlier FAQs in this section.

Bug reports for the Community Edition are managed through here, and we also appreciate if you could try reproducing the very same issue in our free trials. If you cannot, experience has shown us that chances are it is a misconfiguration on your side, in which case we would suggest acquiring a subscription plan to have it solved fast, or you may look for further information in our Wiki or in also in our Forums.

It is not responsible for the health of the project to provide free-personalized support as this would lead to our workers looking for other jobs and therefore abandoning and dooming Feng Office, and neither would it be fair for those who do pay for this service.